Quark Attack:  A Drabbling Exercise
by Jade Sabre
Summary: A collection of various drabbles and short ficlets I've written for Dragon Age, either for one of the LJ comms or for the eponymous Quark's insatiable appetite.
1. crisp

Oftentimes in an exercise to get my fingers moving, I ask my best friend and beta, generally known as LoquaciousQuark, to give me a prompt. Sometimes the result is one super-depressing sentence, and sometimes it is longer, and many of them are written in gchat, but one day I turned around and realized that between those prompts and things like the dao_challenge lightning round, I actually have a fair number of little drabbles, and I might as well share them.

She's also given me a fair number of prompts related to my NWN 2 fics, "Falling Slowly" and "Not Yet By Lighting," so I might post them as well. Thanks for stopping by! As always, I love to hear what you think.

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**Disclaimer:** For all of the things posted in this story, the only things I own are the personalities of my Wardens. Everyone and everything else belongs to the good people at Bioware.

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**Prompt: **Dragon Age, "crisp"

**Originally Written: **9/6/10

**Notes:** Warden Amell

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She's accustomed to the nip of an autumn breeze as it wends its way through the Tower, but the brown leaf she holds in her hand is something new, something wonderful, and she is immensely disturbed when Alistair takes it from her and crushes it with a boyish grin.

Her face falls and he frowns as little leaf bits fall from his hands, and she tells him, "I've never seen leaves _change_ before."

"You've never seen fall before?" he asks, horrified, and then an even greater horror occurs to him and he says, "_You've never jumped in a leaf pile_?"

Between her wind spells and his enthusiasm, it is only a matter of time before they gather up all the leaves for a mile around and she balances on his shoulders before _jumping_ - and part of her says this is madness, jumping from this height, that jumping from any height is madness and death, but his grip on her ankles is firm and he looks up at her with such anticipation that she cannot deny him, and so she closes her eyes, and _leaps_.


	2. elves

**Prompt: **Elves, from dao_challenge

**Originally Written: **8/14/10

**Notes:** The second DA fanfic I ever wrote, the first being "he lets the past behind him lie."

_in which I beat the game for the first time last night, and joined this comm about an hour ago; I've played through both the City Elf and Dalish openings, but that's as far as I've gone, so, uh, here you go:_

_

* * *

_

Katrilin was sure she hated humans. She'd spent her life in the forest, hearing tales of the humans' cruelty over the crackling firelight with clear moonlight filtering through the trees overhead; and she _loved_ this life, this freedom and fresh air, this sense of giving to her community as they gave back to her, each enriching the other as a dying halla enriched the soil so that its brethren might feed. To be torn from that endless cycle, brutally taken into another world by a taint from another's sin, cursed by another's god, was more than losing her bow or an arm; it was her skin, ripped off and bleeding, crying out when stabbed with the vallaslin needle, losing her purpose, her _being_. She did not believe that humans could understand what this meant; she looked at the structures of Ostagar and scoffed at their ruins, spending an hour contemplating the moss as it slowly crumbled the stone beneath it. She cared not for their king, and little for their battle; the human man with whom she fought was nothing more than a child, unmarked and untried, though fairly skilled with a blade. She did not share his grief after the battle, and only the thought that she would not survive the Wilds on her own kept her from leaving him at the witch's hut and seeking her clan. The death of the king and the teyrn's betrayal were _human_ problems; she understood only that the darkspawn taint threatened her forests, and that she chose to fight.

Still, he was affable, her fellow Warden, and the curious Chantry girl was full of questions about the Dalish-not out of fear, or a desire to conquer; her desire for knowledge was genuine, and Katrilin hadn't believed it possible for a human to care so much about her people's lore. They were friendly, if a little cautious, and it startled her to realize that they were cautious because of her hostility, and not out of racial prejudice. The witch had a healthy respect for her people's survival skills; the enchanter watched her with stern eyes, but then she gazed upon the entire world as if she wanted to consume it and yet feared its chaos all at once. So she relented in her hatred, and tentatively treated her companions as if they were lethallin from her clan; they responded with smiles and laughter, and suddenly she thought perhaps she might find a new clan, a new family, forged not from blood but from loyalty, a willingness to die for each others' sakes and for the sake of the world-not just humans, but the elves and the dwarves too-as they wandered the world, sleeping under the open sky, breathing the fresh air, seeking freedom.


	3. fate

**Prompt: **Fate, for dao_challenge

**Originally Written: **9/4/10

**Notes: **The LJ community dao_challenge hosts weekly "lightning rounds" in which a prompt is given and people have fifteen minutes to fill it. All entries for dao_challenge are from lighting rounds unless otherwise noted.

_things I still have not read:_ _The Stolen Throne_

_

* * *

_

_It's in your blood_, they say, but his blood is tainted and furthermore it has never been _his_ blood they've cared about; it's his father's, as if command and charisma are as obviously transmitted as hair and eyes. That's what they want. It's what they _need_, but he doesn't know if he actually has these qualities or if they hide themselves the way he hides himself behind his fellow Warden. They forget he wasn't born for the throne, but for the stables; they forget that no one has handed him the tools to take the throne because his father had even less and reached even greater heights, and blood is something which calls to blood. His father's majesty lies within him, if he only looks; the stars shining through the windows have gilt the throne, if he will only take his seat.

He feels instead the tug of the taint, the scent of darkspawn slain by his sword, the Veil, closed to his attempts to peek into the Fade and yet present, rippling in the unseen breeze. He went with Duncan because for the first time in his life he felt _called_, and while the taint writhes in his belly like a demon it settles in his blood like a friend and this is all familiar, echoes in his mind telling him that _this_ is the place the Maker set aside for him.

And he doesn't know-and no one, aside from a man once as fresh-faced a recruit as he is now (and perhaps also a dishonored teyrn), knows-that this is the life his mother wished for him as he formed in her womb, that he follow in her footsteps without hesitation, blind but sure, blood singing to blood under the twinkling starlight in the open sky.


	4. puppy love: i

**Prompt:** Puppy Love, for da_minorkey

**Originally Written: **9/10/10

**Notes:** There are two drabbles here, because da_minorkey was designed for minor characters and my first one was about a companion.

* * *

He tells himself he isn't staring even as she circles the bookshelf for the fifteenth time, her feet falling in precisely the same steps as before, and he knows this because his eyes trail after her and when she stands on tiptoe to reach for a book high above her head he doesn't offer his aid because the sleeve of her robes slip and for a moment, just a moment, his breath quickens because the delicate shape of her wrist is on display and she turns her blue eyes on him and he will do anything, _anything_ she asks.

"Greagoir," Wynne says, with the barest hint of a smile, her fingers still pointing towards the book on the shelf, "fetch."

.

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He has his pick of any bitch in Denerim, although his courtiers gently encourage him towards those of good breeding; still, he could have his way with the lowest guttersnipe in a back alley and everyone would call it his right, if they acknowledged it at all. He spends hours discerning perfumes, searching for one belonging to a peerless pedigree whose bloodwill only enhance his own. For, as everyone tells him, he _must_ continue his line, and so he searches with his head bowed, his ears alert.

He finds her, but like any lady she must be wooed, and so he fetches flowers and cakes and pretty baubles which often belonged to someone else, but all understand his intent and thus the scoldings are mild. He is, after all, king, and able to do as he pleases. And it _pleases_ him to earn his mistress's praise, her gentle kisses soothing his wounds when he fights for her honor and returns victorious, her head proud, her eyes deep and wise; together, they will found a dynasty that will spread across the country and rule for countless generations to come.


	5. plaid

**Prompt: **plaid

**Originally Written: 9/16/10**

**Notes:** This is a Quark prompt! It's also what made me first realize that I should maybe post these. The original version was going to be about how Zevran's clothes in the final scene offend my sensibilities, but I like this one better. Originally written in gchat.

* * *

Leliana clapped her hands as she considered herself in the mirror. The latest fashions in Denerim weren't quite up to Orlesians standards, but the city _had_ recently suffered the march of a Blight. Allowances could be made.

(Although she had no doubt that the Empress would have continued holding court in Val Royeaux, archdemon on the roof or no. But the Fereldens were in turmoil, and their queen busy on the battlefield-not one of Celene's strong points.)

She was so enthused with her own appearance that she almost missed the shadow that passed behind her, slipping from one of the side chambers towards the side doors to the Great Hall. Her subconscious, however, had switched from "travel-and-battle" mode to "intrigues of court" mode, and as such she was turning and addressing the shadow before she was wholly aware of its existence.

"Why hello there-my lord!" Her flirtatious I've-caught-you-now voice changed as she recognized the man who wasn't really a lord and certainly had never been one of _hers_, but nevertheless deserved, she thought, some respect. He had killed the archdemon, after all, and if he had disappointingly refused to die afterward, well, that couldn't precisely be called his fault.

"Leliana," he said, his voice curt but courteous. "You'll be late for the coronation."

"Ah, yes," she said. "I was just making a few adjustments to my outfit. You know how ladies are."

"Fastidious, in their sensitivities," he said dryly, which was when she actually looked away from his face to glance at what he was wearing.

An "oh my" escaped her lips before she was fully able to contain it-certainly she had _heard_ of such outfits, but never before had she seen one on a human being before, and it certainly...

"You have something to say?" he said, and she tore her eyes away from the fact that the _man_ was wearing a _skirt_, and not only that, but a skirt so short it would be considered scandalous even in Orlais if a lady had dared to wear it.

"Oh!" she said, but her mind was still stuck on the fact that his knees were almost knobbly and shockingly pale-though it was silly to be shocked, considering the man spent so much time in full armor. And it was equally silly that a _bard of Orlais_ was so speechless in the face of Ferelden fashion, and yet-

"It's traditional," he said, and the gruffness of his tone might have been hiding embarrassment, and _that_ anomaly was enough to snap sense into her speech.

"I've never seen such an interesting pattern!" she said, dimpling her smile. "All those little lines, it must be terribly difficult to weave, no?"

"Yes," he said. "The pattern has been in my family for years. My wife wove it."

She looked at him, thinking of his wife-dead or simply gone or perhaps even still in Gwaren, she didn't know-and his daughter to be crowned a queen in her own right, and he the shadowed unwanted thing to be shipped quietly away yet standing proud in the garb of peasants, and she thought it was a sight to match the finery of the Empress of Orlais on her proudest day. "It is lovely," she said.

He inclined his head. "We shall be late," he said, and opened the door, holding it for her.

She passed through the entry and took her place among the courtiers of Denerim, all airing their fashions for the first time in months, free to celebrate safety and serenity with gold and jewels and trains and feathers, vestigial lingerings of an occupation some would never forget. They were familiar, if muted in comparison to her memories; the queen outshone them all, of course, but Leliana thought perhaps it was because edging her skirt, so close to the ground as to be invisible, was the woven pattern of her blood.


	6. girls just want to have fun: i

**Prompt:** Girls Just Want to Have Fun, for dao_challenge

**Originally Written:** 9/18/10

**Notes:** The original note pretty much stands:

_Screw it, I've been wanting to write this for a while. Also, slightly more than fifteen minutes, oops. Also, not really finished. Also-oh, here, just read it._

* * *

Elissa Cousland hadn't quite known what to expect from her first Landsmeet. Her brother had told her all sorts of fun stories about practice yards and wrestling matches, but her mother had removed every practical article of clothing from her chest and replaced them with formal dresses. She suspected a great deal of tedium was in store, though she hoped she would at least be allowed to sit with her mother as she gossiped with her old shieldmaiden friends.

Instead she often found herself sitting in a chamber by herself with nothing but copies of the Chant from various historical periods lining the shelves while her father gossiped and her mother politicked and Fergus abandoned her for his friends. She had been strictly forbidden from exploring, and the one time she had tried she had been so hopelessly lost that she decided to wait for an opportunity to bribe a guard to show her around. She was fifteen, she was alone, she was miserable, and she was _mad_. Her fingers itched for her blade, and the fabric of her dress itched; she wished her mother had at least allowed her silk, but she knew that would have been impractical in the deep of winter. She wanted her cloak, a crackling fire, and Nan telling her stories as she fell asleep; what she got, instead, was Anora Mac Tir.

She was sitting with her chin propped on her hand, staring out the tiny window of the chamber and wondering when someone would remember to fetch her, when Anora entered, her blonde hair immaculately braided, her deep eyes concentrated on the bookshelves and not on the quiet girl with too-broad shoulders in the corner. This was fine by Elissa; it gave her ample opportunity to admire the woman's clothes, poise, and pretty face. She knew who Anora was, of course; the whole court knew it was only Maric's presence that kept Cailan from giving his future wife premature run of the palace, and even then the entire staff was already under her thumb. Anora was smart, Anora was pretty, and Anora was staring at her with a frown.

"You're the Teyrn of Cousland's daughter, aren't you?" she said.

Elissa straightened, her cheeks already maddeningly red. "Yes."

Anora waited, but Elissa couldn't think of anything to say that would be of any interest to the future queen. She arched an eyebrow and said, "What are you doing in the Chant archive showcase room?"

"Not getting lost," she replied, wincing, knowing the future queen probably knew the palace as well as she knew the complete history of the Orlesian occupation.

Anora's face-_changed_, and Elissa felt a fluttering of hope. "This is your first Landsmeet, isn't it," she said, tilting her head as she seemed to catalogue Elissa's childish appearance. Elissa blushed again. "You must be dreadfully bored."

Elissa nodded.

"Come with me," Anora said, reaching out an unexpected hand, "and I'll show you my favorite wine cellar."


	7. new beginnings

**Prompt:** New beginnings, for dao_challenge

**Originally Written:** 10/3/10

**Notes: **I love playing with POV.

_STILL NOT SATISFIED, oh well._

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He wakes, alone.

His companions are all dead; he isn't fully conscious before he smells the rot, dark-blood and dog-blood mingling in the air, sticking to his fur. He whines, wondering where his keeper has gone, but though he strains his ears he cannot hear the familiar heartbeat. He cannot hear _any_ heartbeats, and so he freezes, mid-standing-up, and cocks his head, sniffing; the only thing his nose returns is death in the air around him-death on the wind-death in the water, as he paws through the broken gate and studies the stream running through the human camp. There are few bodies, but he feels the lay of the land in his paws and knows where the battle occurred, there, where the ridge slopes away to the forest. He may search for his keeper there, with the others, but he knows he will not find him. Death is an ending; his keeper is no more.

And yet, in the agony-haze of the past few days, he picks up the trail of a memory, incomplete and confused; floral? He has no use for flowers, because they blast their perfume for indiscriminate bugs and clog the air for those with more refined senses, but his memory tells him-his tail wags in emphasis-that flowers are _important_.

So he puts his nose to the ground and sniffs, and finds his keeper's mortar and pestle, and the crushed remains of the medicine that saved him. Medicine implied care, implied keeper, implied flowers, and _there_, there is the scent of someone living, someone who pricks his ears and wags his tail and turns his head north, trailing flowers in their wake.

He _loves_ this someone.

His pack is dead, his keeper dead, the ground muddy with dark-blood and dog-blood and human-blood, the forest silent. But he can smell the flowers, and follow their scent, and so he puts paw in front of paw and barks, heading home.


	8. puppy love: ii

**Prompt:** Puppy Love, this time for dao_challenge

**Originally Written:** 10/9/10

**Notes: **When I first saw this prompt, what popped into my head was the fic that later became "Domestication" (Morrigan/Loghain, it's on my author page). This fic is a bit of a prelude to that one-same universe, similar themes-but that's not important for the reading of it.

_eta: spent more like 30 minutes on this, oops. It began as two separate drabbles, then changed its mind. :-)_

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Morrigan has spent hours as a wolf, stalking the Wilds in the powerful form, learning to discern scents on the breeze and to watch for the slightest signs of movement, to rely on brute strength and speed rather than intellect and agility. She values the wolf form, so much so that she refuses to share it with the Warden. She knows the Warden thinks she is being bull-headed in this, when in fact she is merely falling back to wolfish pride; the Warden, though a strong, independent woman, is too domesticated. She wastes her assistance on the weak, better left for dead, and meekly submits to both the fools of her Circle and the idiot in charge of an arbitrary tract of land who demands that she lose the man she loves for the sake of a dying country.

It is this love that bothers Morrigan the most. The Arl does at least have an army at his command, and in her weaker moments she glimpses similarity between the Circle's control of its mages and a mother's control of a daughter. But this _love -_- if it truly qualifies - is inexcusable, and the way it turns the Warden into a dribbling stumbling fool boils Morrigan's blood. The bastard's behavior is, if anything, worse; at least the Warden has some sense of self-control, has learned obedience from her trials. Her lover is a man who must be broken in order to learn restraint, and yet she continues to coddle him, and Morrigan would happily consign them both to a happy destruction if it were not for the thin rope leashing her fate to the Warden's.

And so she pointedly sits outside their tent at night, and glares at them when they emerge, sleepy and love-tousled and grinning like the idiots they are. She takes charge of reminding the Warden of their current obligations - not in the least because it is the only way to ensure the Warden hears her opinion of their side quests - and shouts when she's ferreted out the emissaries in whatever group of darkspawn happens to be attacking. She asks the Warden to spar, both to take her away from the bastard and also to practice her own skills; privately, she enjoys the exhilaration that comes from facing a truly talented foe, each armed with nothing more than raw power honed by skill.

One day she is halfway through a rant about the uselessness of chasing nugs through the streets of the Orzammar Commons when the Warden turns to her and says, "Morrigan, I have something for you."

She stops, surprised. The others are scattered throughout the shops - Leliana is attempting to adopt her own nug, while the idiot is currently drooling over dwarven figurines - and the Warden clearly means for this to be a private conversation, despite the sea of dwarves swarming around their elbows. Caring little for their size, and ignoring her own discomfort with crowds, she crosses her arms and says, "Yes?"

The Warden wordlessly hands her a necklace, strands upon strands of pure gold pouring through her fingers. Morrigan watches the shifting glints of light as she studies the intricate links now separate, now twisting into a rope, treasuring more the sensation of metal in her hands as its cool temperature warms to her fingertips, forgotten yet familiar. When she looks up the Warden is watching her closely, and she does not know what to say. No one, save her mother, has ever noticed her love of finery, and her mother never bothered to -

'Tis foolishness to dwell on such things. "'Tis lovely," she says, a far too obvious fact to be worth voicing.

"Put it on," the Warden says, her voice encouraging, and so Morrigan does, slipping it over the wooden necklace she wears at all times, toying with it as it falls against her skin. The Warden puts her hands together, her eyes delighted, and says, "_You_ look lovely."

She cannot open her mouth without something to say, but the words that escape from her lips are new: "Thank you," she says, "so much."

The Warden smiles, and for a moment the sun shines underground. She says, "I wanted to thank you, for being my friend," and Morrigan feels the tug of a gold thread between them and follows, silent yet pleased, in her footsteps.


	9. lessons

**Title:** Lessons

**Prompt:** first time Nathaniel/f!Cousland, from dragonage_kink

**Originally Written:** 10/11/10

**Notes:** De-anoning from my first (and so far, only) kmeme fill. I've never played Awakenings, and I fudged the ages a bit for the kmeme rules.

_first time, here we go!_

* * *

Elissa Cousland was gorgeous.

Long blonde hair—her grandmother's color—cascaded in ripples down her back, framing a heart-shaped face with just enough plump to round the rosy apples of her cheeks. Her blue eyes brightened when her pink lips curved—her _curves_, even when she was sixteen, breasts straining against her bodice (she insisted on binding it too tightly, even when she wasn't wearing armor), her hips swaying despite her military stride—it was a wonder, Nathaniel often thought, that any work got done in Highever Castle, with such a distraction wandering its halls.

What few people realized about Elissa, however, was that she was a rational beauty. She had a head for hard facts and scientific inquiry and a face for attracting assistants, and that was why Nathaniel found himself shivering in the dark damp of the secret passage behind the larder, stark naked.

"Now," Elissa said, holding her candle closer to the book she held in one hand, "it says you are supposed to...rip my bodice? Oh, that won't do," she said, looking down at her expensive gown. Nathaniel saw only the line of her cleavage. "Mother will notice if I ruin this one."

"I still don't believe it says I'm supposed to take my clothing off first," he said in a whine completely unreasonable for a man of nineteen years who'd allegedly bedded fifty women. "Don't the heroes usually catch the woman by surprise?"

"Oh no," she said, so firmly he knew she was lying, "you're doing just fine. Just keep—" she glanced from the book to him and bit her lip and his blood did a confused dance in his veins, rushing from his head to his cock and then back to his face as his manly bits shriveled and he blushed from embarrassment "—well, carry on."

"With the bodice-ripping?"

"No," she said, frowning and looking down at her cleavage again (and there went the blood, laughing as it fled his cheeks), "I suppose I'll do that myself."

"I'll hold them," he said, reaching out as she moved to set down the book and the candle. She allowed him the light, but insisted on leaving the book on the dank floor, face-down and open to the page she'd been reading. He thought it was unusual for the bookish warrior to mistreat the written word in such a fashion, but then she started toying with her ribbons and coherent thought abandoned him.

He _ached_, watching her slow shy movements, wanting to grasp her hands and help her as she tugged at the knot, teasing the ribbons out of the criss-cross lacing—something, it didn't matter, because after a moment it came loose and her dress fell from her shoulders and she said, "Er—could you unlace my corset? Only it's behind me, and I can't reach, but you musn't do anything else."

"Of course," he said, and she turned around, pulling her hair over her shoulder and exposing the back of her neck along with her laces. He set the candle on the ground and refrained from doing any number of things that came to his mind—kissing the nape of her neck, burying his nose in her hair, pushing her back into the wall and lifting her skirts and having her that way—and stayed a respectful distance away, his dexterous fingers making short work of the knots restraining her figure. The corset came away in his hands, and she turned back to him. The candlelight threw long shadows across her face, but the familiar gleam of inquisitiveness still shone in her eyes, and he felt himself smiling.

"Well," she said, standing before him in a shift that fell freely around her form, hiding its shape, "there's an important piece of information I need to know, before we continue."

"Yes?" he said, not exactly _aroused_—apparently knowing she was looking was keeping him from keeping it up for more than a moment—but certainly still...interested.

"Yes," she said, bending over to pick up the book—his fingers itched—and she busied herself scanning the page to find her spot, hiding her face as she said, "Do you find me attractive?"

"Yes," he said.

"Truly?"

"Yes."

"Attractive enough to—"

"Elissa," he said, "I'm fairly certain they don't talk this much in that novel."

She finally looked up and said in a rush, her cheeks red, her eyes wide, "It's crucial to know, because in the books the man always thinks the woman is the most perfect woman he's ever seen, and I'm _not _perfect but the books all say this is worth it and I want to find out if it's worth it but if I'm not perfect I don't know if it will work and I think you're the most handsome man I've ever met which is exactly right on my end but I don't think I can do this if you don't think I'm at least pretty and I—"

The wall of sound momentarily stunned him, and as her words crashed around him he saw the downturn of her lip and the puff of warm air from between her lips turn to mist in the cool air of the passage and her bright eyes uncertain and he was stepping, no, _running_ to her, pushing her into the wall with his body hard enough to rob her of the breath to speak; his hands trapped her wrists against the wall, and as he worked a knee between her thighs he pressed his lips to her ear and said, _you are the most perfect woman I have ever met_.

"Oh," she said, weak, "but you haven't met everyone—"

"Elissa," and her name came like a prayer as he turned his head and her hair tickled his nose, "I don't care about that."

"You care about everything," she said, without much conviction, as he started kissing her ear, her jaw, pressing his lips into her skin and feeling its warm give. Her moan was surprised, and she twisted beneath him, the book falling from her slackened grip with an unheeded _thump_, "your father and your family glory and the fact that they're throwing a party for your departure when you specifically said you'd rather leave under the cover of darkness with nary a word—"

He stopped kissing her, pulled back to look at her face. She bit her lip, and thumped her hands against the wall; he loosened his grip on her wrists and said, "How do you know that?"

"Delilah told me," she said, and then she cupped his face in her hands—a surprise—and _kissed_ him, her lips soft and sweet and gentle and carrying a taste of—he froze, and she drew back and said, "I didn't want you to leave without saying goodbye."

"This isn't goodbye," he said, standing with his hands settled in the curve of her waist and one naked leg drawing her shift taut across her thighs, her breasts brushing his chest with only a thin layer of cotton separating her skin from his.

"No," she said, "this is—" and she wrapped her arms around his neck and drew him close and whispered words in his ear, words which would haunt him in the years to come, juxtaposing stories of a murderous Grey Warden with the soft-strong-_perfect_ young woman holding him and stroking his hair. His fingers dug into her waist, thumbs pressing against her belly to the hard muscle beneath, and he thought for a moment that he was actually content.

She seemed to sense this; she drew back, and then wormed her hands up between them and pushed against his chest. He stumbled back, and she bent once more and retrieved her book and said, "Now, it says here you're supposed to rip my shift as well."

"Does it," he said.

"Yes," she said, nodding, "and then you are to...fondle? my breasts." She looked up at him, puzzled. "Do you know what that means?"

"Oh, yes," he said.

"And you know what to do after?"

Even if fifty had really been one, and even if that one had been interrupted by Thomas coming by the stables when he had been _specifically told not to_—"I have a fair idea," he said, figuring the rest would follow.

"Well, then," she said, tossing the book aside, far from the candle's glow, smiling a beautiful smile and holding her arms wide, "teach me."


	10. legend

**Prompt:** Legendary, for dao_challenge

**Originally Written:** 10/23/10

**Notes: **I wrote this short piece to make up for the fact that the fic I actually wanted to write would take too long. That fic is called "Legend," and you can read it here on Fanfiction dot net. (It is possibly my favorite fic.)**  
**

_why do you always come up with things I cannot do justice to in fifteen minutes_

_rephrase: why do i always use your prompts to come up with things i cannot do justice to in fifteen minutes_

_here is a seat-of-my-pants response to the prompt:_

* * *

There are _so many things _they won't be able to put in the history books.

Like the time Leliana innocently suggested the Warden take a walk down by the creek, as it was such a _lovely _morning, and the Warden just happened to stumble upon Alistair while bathing, and let out such a squeal that Alistair thought he was under attack from a shriek and nearly killed her before he realized that shrieks were usually black, not beet-purple from embarrassment.

Or the time that Morrigan tripped while casting an ice spell and froze half the party as well as her own feet, leaving plenty of time for the hurlocks to hack away at the Warden's encased form and cause a ringing in her ears that lasted for days.

Then there was the time the Warden drunkenly admitted to ogling Duncan and Alistair just as drunkenly insisted she ought to wash her mouth out with soap, and the time Alistair actually tried to wash Zevran's mouth with soap, which led to some rather muddy wrestling by some rather half-naked men. Sure, it destroyed their camp site, but the Warden didn't really mind.

They can't talk about the arguments they had, about the Blight and its causes, about the Chant, about the Maker's role among his people (about, if Morrigan deigned to join, the existence of the Maker itself); the tale will have to fit Chantry standards, after all, if it is to be proclaimed to the people. It will be a moral tale, of course, and the bit where no one made a heroic sacrifice to end the Blight, where in fact two Wardens became King and Queen of Ferelden-well, eventually they'll make it mesh. There will be no mention of maleficar, or blood magic, unless the mention ends with the eradication of evil; there will be no grey lines, no innocent children dead at the hands of anyone other than a darkspawn.

There will be heroes: deeds without failures, love without laughter, duty without joy; and the tale will lose something, in the telling.


	11. zevran in love

**Prompt:** Zevran in love**  
**

**Originally Written: **1/15/11**  
**

**Notes: **A Quark prompt! Also, I neglected to explain my absence in the last chapter I posted. I shall blame a combination of real life and the fact that I didn't beat DA2 until last month. In my desire to avoid spoilers, I dropped out of the DA fandom for a while-but I'm back! These prompts are still older, but, hey, better late than never.

* * *

Wynne was the one who figured it out.

She wasn't _supposed_ to. No one was supposed to. _He_ hadn't even figured it out, and was doing a very good job of not figuring it out, thank you very much. He killed and he joked and that was all he ever had to think about it—and if somehow the killing and the joking didn't fill up his mind, he could always think about thighs. Pale thighs, tan thighs, hard-as-rock thighs, soft-and-fleshy thighs, boy thighs, girl thighs—thinking about all these thighs took lots of time, especially as he had to dedicate his mind to an intense remembrance of each pair of thighs he'd known. So between the killing and the joking and the thighs, he didn't have _time_ to figure things out, or fantasize about thighs he'd never had the pleasure of seeing. Frankly, there wasn't even anything of interest in thighs he'd never seen, especially when he'd never seen breasts or shoulders or even _ankles_ to go along with them. He couldn't even spare time to figure out how the Circle mages managed to run without lifting their robes above their knees. There was absolutely _no time_ to figure out why his stomach dropped like a stone every time she tripped in battle or failed to smile when he slumped next to her with an innuendo at the end of the day. He was running on instinct, living on borrowed time, waiting for her to kill him or for him to kill her or for the darkspawn to kill them all—he didn't _care_ enough to figure it out.

Except then he was sitting with Wynne and Alistair, the bastard, was across the campfire making her _laugh_, and the sound distracted him from his attempts to snuggle into Wynne's warm, warm bosom (it was ample and heaving under her robes, which was more than could be said for any other Circle mages in the area, not that bosoms were as interesting as thighs or that he even minded when bosoms were small enough for his hands to cover them completely), and the old woman crossed her arms and said, "Have you told her, yet?"

"Hm?" he said, trying to focus his attention on her bosom, but her steely blue gaze refused to allow him the pleasure.

"You know what I'm talking about," Wynne said, barely tilting her head in the direction of the laughter (now coming from a figure lying sideways on the ground, clutching her sides, but the damn fire was preventing him from catching any glimpses).

He laughed, though it was not nearly as warm a sound. "My dear woman," he said, "you are attempting to redirect my interest, and it simply won't work. I am much too dedicated—"

"To ignoring your feelings, yes, and denying her any expression of hers in the process, and I wonder how far you will drive her away before you realize what you are losing."

He was fairly certain his mouth was hanging open, his mind cleared of all thought and grasping at uncertain straws best left to float downstream. Better to drown, he told himself, and his mind replied, perhaps better to have lo—

"You mistake my interest," he said, wincing at the weakness of the excuse.

She raised an eyebrow at him, her gaze cutting like—like many sharp knives, such as he hadn't faced since he underwent his initiation into the Crows—and she said simply, "It is your choice, of course, but if you are planning on wasting away while she packs herself into a neat little box and chooses Alistair for his sweetness, I suggest you do us a favor and announce your intentions."

"Perhaps you think she should have killed me when she had the chance," he said, strangely stung by the thought—Wynne had never _approved_ of him, exactly, but she never blushed at his innuendo, no matter how flustered her words, and once or twice he thought he caught a spark of amusement in her eyes. It reminded him, in so many words, of the oldest whores from his mother's brothel, when the young men would treat them to flattery, as if they remembered times when such flattery was given from truth and not mere affection. It was comforting and familiar and he liked drawing it forth, and the thought that it was hatred and not gratitude—

"I think she made the choice necessary for her to continue living with herself," Wynne said, "which perhaps was not wise at the time, but has the potential to right itself—if you will _allow _it to."

He refused to shrink under her glare, but his words were not as strong as he would have liked. "I am under her command," he said. "I cannot act of my own accord."

"If you think she does not have every intention of allowing you to leave," Wynne said, "then perhaps you do not know her as I thought."

He knew. He saw her kindred gaze—one a Crow and the other a Circle mage and a Warden to boot and neither truly free to act of their own will—across the campfire, in the heat of battle, in the moments between waking and sleep when one went on watch and the other retired to a tent. It was unspoken in her words—never orders, barely even requests—in the shy smiles she gave him, hesitantly inviting without ever explicitly asking, and how could he respond when he'd never learned the words he needed?

"I cannot," he repeated, and Wynne sighed, and slowly stood.

"Life is too short, Zevran," she said, looking down at him.

"You lecture an assassin on the brevity of life?"

"I lecture a youth," she said, "who knows too much of death and too little of what ought to fill a life before it comes." She looked at him a moment more; the dying echoes of laughter floated from across the campfire, and her gaze shifted as if to show him where he ought to be. He resisted the urge to turn his head. "Good night, assassin."

"Not as good as a night as it would be with your bosom for a pillow," he said, but she did not smile, and as soon as she went inside her tent he sighed and allowed his shoulders to slump, briefly. Camp had gone quiet, aside from Alistair discretely unpacking the dolls (_figurines_) that he used to entertain himself when he sat on watch alone.

He wasn't in the mood to tease the ex-templar about them, and so he stood and went to his tent. He stopped, and turned to look at the sky; as he dropped his gaze, he saw her standing on front of her own tent, her arms crossed, her eyes on him. He smiled, and it was soft and genuine and he couldn't convince it to leave his face; she smiled in return, as true as her laughter—but then, she had not been laughing for him.

"Sweet dreams, Zevran," she called, her voice quiet but pitched to carry.

"Of you? But of course," he replied, and for a moment he thought she might—but she was gone in a whisper of cloth, and he decided to disappear, as well. He had his bedroll and a blanket to keep him warm and the memory of Rinna's laugh and death and firm-fleshy thighs to keep his thoughts occupied, and he locked his heart away.


	12. money management

**Prompt:** Money Management

**Originally Written:** 1/11/11

**Notes: **Any and all comments on my extended absence will be...noted. A lot of real life upheaval and then I played Mass Effect, but I was reading through the DA ficlets I hadn't posted and decided they were worth putting out there.

This is another Quark prompt! Also, the Aeducan opening is possibly my favorite in the entire game. I have a massive Aeducan/Brosca friendfic plotted that will probably sadly never see the light of day, but _oh_ are the dwarves a lot of fun.**  
**

* * *

"Darin-"

"No."

"But _Darin_-"

"I said _no_, Alistair."

"But _Darin_," he said, giving a look that was probably pleading and puppyish at close range but just looked like a starving nug from her perspective, gesturing dramatically at the stand, "he's offering a _discount_."

She had to strain her neck to see her fellow Warden; looking at the dwarf standing across from her, meeting his blue gaze without emotion-these actions were effortless, as familiar as taking a breath. The pain, too, was familiar, though cut deeper and with a different blade, as if severing her last whispering hope of home.

"No," she said, and then, because she was born for courtesy, "thank you," and then, because she was bred to twist the knife, "ser knight."

He flinched and she turned away. "Come, Alistair," she said, noting how easily the human fell into a second's position, "I believe we shall be spending our coin elsewhere."


	13. luck of the dice

**Prompt:** Alistair, Luck of the Dice

**Originally Written: **1/11/11

**Notes:** Lin is Quark's f!Cousland warrior.

_alistair, luck of the dice_

* * *

He woke up with a pounding headache and Lin nestled in his arms, wearing nothing but a happy smile as she cradled a giant hammer in her sleep.

_Shit_. He was never saying "surprise me" again.


	14. zevran's first tattoo

**Prompt:** Zevran's First Tattoo

**Originally Written:** 1/11/11

**Notes: **oh no this stuff is getting to be two years old. I've only got a couple more before my life radically changed and ficcing to a backseat to talking to my future husband on Skype all the time. Little things.

I remember not being entirely happy with this one but being unable to improve it. So, here it is, for what it is.

_zevran's first tattoo:_

* * *

It was a lingering pain, sharp sting turned to dull throb in each place the needle penetrated, itching with the unfamiliarity of the ink spreading under his skin. He knew not to squeak or squirm-for all his mischief, his soul was silent and still-but his mother saw his face, and paused in her work.

"Sh, da'len," she said. One gloved thumb pressed against his cheek, wiping away tears he hadn't realized he'd shed-his eyes were on the fine embroidery, part of him old enough to admire the skill and calculate the cost, the rest still caught up in its intricate beauty. "If we were home under the trees, the elder would stop me and tell me you were not ready for the vallaslin. And you are young, but I do not know-" She stopped, her hand shaking against his cheek "-and how will they know you for lethallin, if you are not marked?" Her breath came in a shaky stutter, as if she too wept. "Now be brave, my vhenan. It's no more painful than dying."

He awoke in the dead of night, but he had no need of candle; he searched with his hands, finding the ink he used to sign his contracts, the needles so easily slipped in a target's veins, a paperweight. He was long overdue by Dalish standards, and he hadn't seen the gloves in years, but the dream lingered in his eyes, guiding his hands to make the first incisions.

Over time, the Crows had stripped him of pain, of affection, of _self_; inch by inch he reclaimed himself, and for the first time, considered himself whole.

-fin-


	15. kiss in the rain

**Prompt:** Hawke/Fenris, kiss in the rain (from bearfootscar over on tumblr)

**Originally Written:** Today!

**Notes:** The Hawke in this fic is the only Hawke I've ever written besides my own, namely the lovely Euphemia Marian "Eppie" Hawke who features in nearly all of LoqaciousQuark's epic Dragon Age II fanfiction. If you're a Hawke/Fenris fan, you've probably already read her, but if you haven't, GET TO IT. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this offering.

* * *

"You're welcome," and he paused, and Hawke felt something more than drunken hesitation in the silence, "to stay the night. If you want."

Hawke considered the offer through the prismed wineglass dangling from her fingers, the last dregs of her drink casting the occasional berry-red sheen over the room. The thought did appeal to her—more than appealed to her, was the thought she'd been trying to ignore for three long, long years—but it wasn't quite…right. Time. She wanted to stay, but not like this, not after a night of companionable drinking while Fenris tried to decide what to do about his sister's letter. He had too much worry on his mind, and too much drink in his blood—she didn't want to be his _distraction_, though she knew that wouldn't be all there was to it—but she wanted all the other parts to be the whole of it, unburdened, and now it would just be…oh, Maker's breath, she was too tipsy and tired to chase Fenris 'round her thoughts.

"Thanks," she said, filling the word with alcoholic cheer, as she'd filled her every word to counteract his fretful pacing (though lately it had been more of a frantic weaving into various bits of broken furniture), "but I probably ought to be going home."

He sighed, not quite relief, but too much time had gone by for her to be offended by it. "Then I shall escort you."

"Fenris," she said, "you don't have to walk me home."

"I insist," he said unsteadily, crossing over to her side of the table and offering a hand. She watched it tremble before her face for a moment before taking it and pulling herself up, leaning all her weight on him. He stumbled, as she had known he would, and so she reached out—slowly, because even after all these years he still startled when he was drunk—and touched his elbow, letting him know she was there, before grabbing it to steady him.

"Fenris," she said, because she was tipsy and enjoyed the feel of his name in her mouth, "I don't think you _can_ walk me home."

"Of course I can," he said, and she felt him leaning into her grasp and _oh_ she wanted to stay. "It's far too dangerous—"

And of course they were still having _this_ conversation, even after all these years, and she would always be offended even as she was touched. "We cleaned out the Follower of She's hideout last week," she pointed out. "There won't be anyone on the streets for months, and even if there is, Aveline's guards will be on patrol."

"Aveline's guards didn't stop the Followers," he almost slurred, his head hanging as he tried to find his footing.

"You're right. I shall have to speak to her about that," Hawke said, standing perfectly still as he continued to lean on her. "And _you_ shall have to sit down, and let me be on my way."

"Hawke—"

"Fenris," she said, steering him to her chair and bumping him into it until his knees gave way and he sat with a metallic _thump_, "I will be _fine_."

He looked up at her from the chair, entirely too much worry and care in his green eyes—and they were unfairly bright for how drunk he was—and said again, "Hawke—"

"Good night, Fenris," she said firmly, tamping down _hard_ on her desire to plop herself on his lap and drown in those beautiful eyes, and she turned away and walked away—in a _very_ straight line, if she did say so herself—and collected her staff from where it leaned against the wall.

"Hawke," he croaked, and she turned back as she fiddled to fit her staff in its sheath. He closed his eyes, creased his forehead, and said, slowly, "Good…night."

She smiled, trying to hide her laughter, and said again, "Good night, Fenris," drawing out the syllables of his name because they were just so _nice_ to say, and she left the house before she started admitting such truths aloud.

It was raining.

She sighed, standing on Fenris's covered stoop, and fished her hood from one of her pockets—and wouldn't her mother have been horrified to see her wearing something so wrinkled in public, but it was far too late (for little girls to be out and about, her mother teased) for anyone to notice or for Hawke to care. She secured the ties under her chin and stepped into the rain, watching the water fall on either side of her, leaving her dry. Anders had called the hood's enchantments frivolous, but it kept the rain off her hair and more than once _he'd_ been the one with the headcold after a night spent fighting cultists in a thunderstorm. Besides—and this she hadn't told him, because she knew he never meant to hurt her feelings—the hood was one of the few things she had left from Lothering, where the pouring rain had been good for crops but less good for those who had to work the fields. She still remembered her father bringing it home for her after her mother complained about how muddy her eldest daughter was on a daily basis—and it hadn't stopped her from getting muddy, but it _had_ kept her warm and dry. She had her father's staff, now, a reminder of the strength and discipline she'd inherited; the hood reminded her of her father's care, and his love.

She took the long way home, the warm summer rain clearing the air of the usual stink of city life, washing the cobblestones clean, and there was something lovely about the city at night, the torches sputtering in their sconces, their light splintered across a thousand little puddles gathered between the uneven stones. She caught one of Aveline's patrols huddled under an alcove in an alley and waved as she skipped over a larger puddle, resisting the urge to splash through it—but even with the burdens of her friends and her enemies weighing on her mind, she felt remarkably free, wandering her city at night, tracing memories of battles and intrigues alike, seeing the pockets of peace she helped create amidst the turmoil of the years.

And there was her house, settled amongst her neighbors, the Amell crest well-lit so that she could always find her way—and if she'd cheated and conjured a magelight to shine no matter the weather, it was still a bright promise of cheer for anyone who saw it, and she liked that. She stopped and looked up at it, taking a deep breath of the rain-fresh air, and as she exhaled she heard the unmistakable sound of someone splashing through a puddle behind her.

She turned around, already reaching for her staff—and froze, as frozen as Fenris was, standing ankle-deep in that one puddle by the column where the stones had formed a gutter of their own accord. His head was lifted just enough for her to see his eyes, staring at her with an expression of…defiant guilt, if she had to guess. His clothes were soaked, pinched in waterlogged wrinkles and clinging to his skin, and his hair was plastered to his head, oddly disarrayed from where he'd no doubt shoved it out of his eyes, and rain dripped from the end of his long nose, clearly ran down his neck into his upturned collar, magnified the lyrium running down his chin. He looked, plainly put, pathetic.

Hawke relaxed her stance, crossed her arms, this time unable to hide her laughter and she said, "Why, Fenris, whatever are you doing?"

His body was still tensed in stillness, ready to take another step but unsure of the ground beneath his feet. "Taking…a walk," he said slowly.

"It's a bit wet for that," she observed.

"Yes. I…" and he broke her gaze, thinking. "The rain is…sobering."

"I see," she said. "And are you quite sober now?"

"Yes," he said, "thank you. And you are home…safe?"

"As I told you I'd be," she said. Then, because it really _was_ a sad sight, she said, "You're welcome to come inside, if you'd like." She saw the hesitation in his stillness, and added, so that they were clear, "There's a fire, and it's warm. You'll have to share the hearth with Dog, I'm afraid, but so long as _he_ doesn't get wet it shouldn't smell too bad."

"Ah," he said, and slowly he straightened, relaxed as much as he could when anyone that wet had to be shivering with cold. "Yes. I would…appreciate that."

"Then come on," she said, still amused, waiting for him behind the safety of her rain shield as he approached. This close, she could see every drop of water lingering on his skin the way her lips had once—"I don't think," she said, "the rain is as sobering as you claim."

This close, the defiant guilt held every ounce of concern she'd been trying to treat lightly, trying to shield herself from because she'd already given him her heart and to know that he held it so carefully, even after all this time—

"I am glad," he said, with a sober, carefully measured tone, "that you are safe."

And she was careless and _free_, and the city was beautiful and the elf was handsome and she loved him with words she hadn't been allowed to say, and without another thought she slipped her hand around his neck and pulled him close for a kiss, and even her father's magic couldn't prevent her clothes from becoming just as soaked as his as his arms went around her, kissing her back, long and sweet and _relieved_, unspoken hope between their lips that maybe, one day, they could share freedom together.

The kiss ended, not-quite-broken, and Fenris's breathing rasped against her skin and Hawke looked down at her wet clothes and whispered, "You did that on purpose."

Fenris's laugh startled out of him, and _oh_ she loved surprising him, even if the cost was his arms falling away as he said, "You mentioned a fire?"

"Yes," she said, reaching out and taking his hand, and he let her. "Follow me."


	16. atelophobia

**Prompt:** Atelophobia - fear of imperfection Cailan/Anora

**Originally Written:** today!

**Notes:** from a tumblr phobia prompt meme

* * *

She could remember a time when she never needed a mirror.

Her father didn't care how she looked; he cared that she grew up strong, and smart, and with a healthy hatred for Orlais. As Cailan grew and proved himself a reckless fool in her father's eyes, he also cared that she grew cautious, and wise, and subtle, for it wouldn't do for a peasant queen to run her royal husband's court in public. We're blessed, her father would say, to live in a country where a peasant may think to be queen, let alone become one. She tried to live up to that blessing. Her father cared for Ferelden; she only cared to see pride reflected in his eyes.

Maric had laughed—and all her memories of the old king were of his laughter, and she heard its echoes in his son—Maric had told her she was a pretty thing, teased her father about his ugly mug with such a golden girl following his footsteps, though the teasing had lessened after her mother's death. Her father had loved her mother, perhaps more than could be said for Maric and his wife; her father had loved the queen enough for them both, Maric said, in a moment of drunken regret she witnessed from the shadows, watching from the wrong side of the threshold as her father said nothing. I hope my child does better by yours, the king said, and her father said, you're drunk, and the king said, she's a beautiful girl.

Cailan hadn't cared when they'd been young and he'd pulled on her braids; he cared for the sting of her slap and the imperious anger in her voice when she told him off. He'd tried to boss his future bride, but she hadn't listened and he held her in awe for it. When he'd finally noticed, somewhere between childhood and what came after, he'd been tongue-tied for weeks, following her but staying just beyond her reach, as if he didn't dare—Cailan, she said impatiently, it's _me_, and tumbling from his lips came such wordy protestations as formal lovers find between the pages of a book, and she stopped them with a kiss. It's _me_, she said, and for a time his endless chatter was silent on the subject, until a whirlwind of shock and grief and ceremony and responsibility brought them to their marriage and she found herself curiously alive beneath his touch, and _Anora_, he said, laying her in their royal bed, resting his head beside hers, pressing his lips to her ear, you're _perfect_.

She never needed a mirror. Her servants knew how her appearance ought to look; she saw all she needed in her husband's eyes.

And then years went by and a country needed ruling and there was work to be done, the old king's spirit haunting the shadow of his son's steps as she tried to help him navigate the peaks and valleys of the crown, as he tried to make her smile in the doing of it. And they would laugh together, but years went by and the work was hard and no child joined their mirth, and one morning the queen caught herself looking in a glass on the wall, for she could not remember the last time she'd seen her king's approval. He still laughed as he drank deeply from his cups, but with a bitterness his father never had; she sipped at her wine and stubbornly avoided her father's sad eyes. Her king loved her—and that she never doubted—and yet his eye wandered and his restless hands roamed, seeking glory or—something, but though she tried she could not discover what it might be.

On the eve of the battle of Ostagar she sat before the rarely-used mirror in her bedchamber and wondered; her features were the same, flawless, though she'd never needed them before; the deft touch of her intelligence, the weight of her judgment were routinely praised or hated, but always respected. She'd grown up as her father had hoped; she'd married as the king had desired; she'd ruled as herself, and yet her husband was gone beyond her reach.

The queen of Ferelden studied herself in a mirror and wondered, for the first time, if perhaps she simply wasn't enough.


	17. spectrophobia

**Prompt: **Spectrophobia – fear of ghosts and phantoms, Anders and Thistle Hawke

**Originally Written:** 12/4/13

**Notes:** also from a tumblr phobia prompt meme

* * *

Anders is a healer. And a mage, and an abomination, but his mother taught him to bandage cuts and set broken bones long before he became any of those things. He had learned well, for life in the Anderfels had brought with it plenty of injuries, and it hadn't been long after seeing his first cow fall and fail to rise again that he had watched his first man bleed out from the careless slip of another's axe. He'd watched his mother try her best, but more than that he'd heard the victim's screams, the raspy sob of the axeman's regret; he'd watched as the man's lifeblood drained from his cheeks and into the dust, leaving only a sallow cold in its place.

"You shouldn't have brought the boy," his father had said that night, and his mother hadn't replied, had tucked him into bed and kissed his forehead to hide the guilt in her eyes, but he saw that too.

Since then he has traveled half the mortal waking world and wandered more of the spirits' realm than he wished, but never has he seen even a trace of a departed soul. The Chantry teaches that death is the soul's last crossing of the Veil, its only crossing into the worlds beyond the Fade, but no one has ever seen these worlds and even the spirit in his head knows only that mortals _are_ until they _are not_. That souls exist, he cannot dispute, but that they continue to exist, that they contain some immortal stuff such as gods are made of—

That he doubts.

He tries not to care. No magic exists powerful enough to reunite soul and body, after all, and once he has lost a patient, the pain of their passing becomes—he has seen too much death to care for someone who no longer cares, to worry what happens after when he has no evidence that an after exists. Better to remember what was, and though in Darktown what was is usually more pitiful than the pallor that follows, it is enough for him to cope. Karl's death is harder; Karl's death hurts beyond the sting of professional pride and failure of compassionate effort; Karl's death lingers, wakes him on the nights when Justice's protection is not enough to save him from the nightmares that demons work upon the easy prey of his mind.

He cannot heal himself. He throws himself into the work of healing others, of healing Hawke, though deep within her eyes he sees the deaths that dog her steps and nothing he can say or do will convince her that they are dead and gone, as far beyond her reach as she is beyond theirs. _You cannot help them_, he wants to say, _you will kill yourself trying_, _you can only touch the living_, though some days he is not sure if his words are for her or for the gnawing anger in his heart. Some days he sees the long shadows stretching behind her, clawing at her feet, and wants to say instead, _they cannot catch you_; _they cannot hurt you again_.

But of course the memories still linger, and of course she wouldn't listen even if he did speak, and he watches as the dying and the long-dead alike sink their skeleton bones into his love, as her lifeblood pours out, a libation splashed on barren soil, an offering on deaf ears. Her face turns pale in the rosiest firelight, and she is cold to his touch, and when he watches her turn that ice upon the world he is—_afraid_, though he cannot name his fear. He cannot help against specters only she can see, and so helpless he stays by her side and hopes, for her sake, that the deceased yet live beyond the shambling corpses they see, if only so that she may meet them and slay them again. If only it will give her _peace_.

Foolishness, Justice calls it. Let her exhaust herself; we have our own work to do.

Anders is a healer. There is no cure for death.


	18. thistle and bethany

**Prompt:** Thistle and Bethany. Something?

**Originally Written:** 12/12/13

**Notes:** Same Hawke as the last one. Eventually I will post my DARBB fic here; it's up on AO3, and you can read more about her there.

* * *

She tries not to remember Bethany. Father she can't escape, and Mother and Carver are too tied up in Kirkwall, in the bloody life she's made for herself, but Bethany lies dead in Ferelden, her body hastily cremated with a blast of fire from her sister's hands. She and Wesley have the dubious honor of being the first human bodies her sister's fire had touched—the first, but far from the last.

And so dead and gone, not as quietly as Father but not so mangled as Mother, she stays in Ferelden, under the same cloudy skies where they'd practiced their magic, close to the fallow fields far from prying eyes where she'd traced frost patterns on the cold earth as Father tried to show her that magic could be beautiful.

Thistle had taken easily to her magic, taking books from Father's library and curling up in her nook by the window, learning caution as a matter of discipline, taking spells apart and putting them together again; Bethany had to be coaxed to the art, but she perfected it in a way Thistle's technical expertise could never have managed. Where Thistle could satisfy the height and depth and breadth of her father's instructions, Bethany invented solutions; where Thistle terrorized Carver with thunder, Bethany illumined the house with a thousand twinkling stars. Thistle's magic was a tool; Bethany's was an art.

Bethany never lit the estate in Kirkwall; Thistle doubts she would have made a difference, and yet the estate is darker all the same for the lack. But it's better this way. Bethany wasn't tough; Bethany was afraid; Bethany loved, and Kirkwall spares not such weakness.

Bethany lies died in Ferelden, where there is no smog to block the sun; and lying dead in Ferelden, Bethany is safe.


	19. harry potter AU

**Prompt:** Thistle Hawke & Co: Harry Potter AU.

**Date:** 1/14/2014

**notes:** for a three-sentence (har har har) AU meme on tumblr.  
let's not talk about how much errata I came up with for this.

* * *

"Oh, _do_ have a good time," Bethany said, hopping from foot to foot as Thistle wrapped her sister's latest knitting creation around her own neck. "I hope it's warm enough."

"It's warm," her sister said.

"You mean aside from all the holes," Carver said darkly, his voice floating over the back of the armchair in which he'd curled up to sulk.

"It's warm," Thistle repeated, her voice hard. "Keep it up and I won't be bring you back a single treat from Honeydukes."

"But you will remember the Fizzing Whizbees, won't you?" Bethany said. "I got full marks on my last Charms essay and you _promised—_"

"If you don't stop fussing she won't be _able_ to go," Orana said, appearing at Thistle's side and tugging at her hand. "Come on, we're going to be late!"

With a quick exchange of "goodbye," Carver's mumbled and sullen, Thistle and Orana left the Hufflepuff common room, made their way past the delicious scents coming from the kitchen, and climbed the stairs to join the other students mingling in the Entrance Hall, waiting to be escorted to Hogsmeade. Thistle found an unoccupied spot along the wall and pulled out her shrunken, battered copy of _Practical Defensive Magic _while Orana, after an exasperated sigh, wandered off to meet up with some of the other girls in their year. Finally Professor Stannard, the tall and imposing Transfiguration teacher, and Professor Orsino, the Charms teacher, called for everyone's attention, and the long walk began.

("This part is boring," Isabela said, reading over Varric's shoulder. "Skip to the good part."  
"Which part?"  
"The part where we're all together."  
"All right, all right," he said, sadly passing over pages of loving description and fanciful imagination.)

Her hands were so cold she could barely hold onto all the bags of candy, and so she pushed open the door to the Three Broomsticks, hoping to find an unoccupied chair near the fireplace. She clutched her bags close to her chest as she jostled through the crowd—unusually large, even for the winter—and suddenly broke through the lines and found herself at the edge of a large half-circle, wherein a blonde Slytherin boy was standing on a chair, blocking the fireplace and reading from a long scroll of parchment while everyone else watched him and giggled.

"...and so I have called us all together today because we must, and I repeat, _must_ take a stand against the cruelty and subjugation of our fellow creatures—"

"Aw, knock it off, Anders," called someone from the crowd.

"—and realize that if we do not act, then we deserve to be treated no better." He paused for breath and looked up from his speech. He was a long-nosed, pale young man, his hair neatly pulled away from his face, his cheeks a bit gaunt, his eyes the color of butterbeer, and most of all he was between Thistle and the fireplace. "Now, I propose a plan of action, beginning with asking Headmistress Elthina to—"

More jostling from behind, and suddenly a dark-skinned boy with a shock of white hair pushed through and said, "Anders, enough."

"Fenris," a girl said urgently, gracefully slipping around Thistle as she tried to catch his robes, "I really don't think—"

"—and begin immediate compensation," Anders continued, "of the injured parties—"

"Enough," the white-haired boy repeated, stepping into the half-circle, stopping Anders short. "You're being disruptive."

"If I am," Anders said, his voice cold, "it is only because I _care_."

"Well it _is_ bad for business," said the girl—Fenris's friend, and both Gryffindors, and vaguely familiar. Her tone was light, her arms crossed, the sheer amount of glittering jewelry on her hands and arms probably a breach of the dress code. "Think about poor Madam Lusine."

"Think of the house elves!" Anders cried, brandishing his parchment. "Think of all their skill and labor, their tireless service, and all for what?"

"Yes, but they like doing it," the girl said. "Who are we to deny them?"

"Deny them? But we have already denied them fair pay, independent living, _clothes—_"

"Nobody cares," Fenris said.

Anders stopped, his mouth slightly ajar, the parchment waving gently in the air as he sucked down a breath. "_What_?"

"I said," Fenris said, deliberately crossing to the fireplace, his back to Anders as he warmed his hands, "_nobody cares_."

"Oh this'll be good," murmured the Gryffindor girl, winking at a startled Thistle, who inexplicably found herself blushing.

Anders gaped a moment more, then started waving wildly at the crowd. "Of course they do! You there," he said, pointing at Thistle, who wished very much that she had just taken her candies and walked back to Hogwarts alone, "what say you about the plight of the common house elf?"

Thistle blinked. "I don't...have a house elf."

A queer sort of half-smile, one that less made Thistle want to blush than to back away slowly, came across his face. "See?" he said. "Here is a noble woman who refuses to participate in the system of oppression!"

"Idiot," Fenris said, in a muttered sort of way.

Anders hopped down from his chair and came towards her, hand outstretched; she dearly wanted to act on her instincts, but the crowd behind pushed her forward. "And what's your name, my dear lady?"

Acutely aware of everyone's stares—including a squat blonde seated in a corner booth, scribbling away—Thistle awkwardly crammed all of her bags into one hand in order to shake his hand and say, "Hawke. But I don't—"

Instead of releasing her hand, as a normal person might, Anders dragged her into the center of the clearing, leaping upon his chair and raising her hand up as high as it would go. "This young lady and I stand against the tyranny of wizardom! Who's with us?"

"It doesn't count if she's coerced," Fenris said, half-turning from the fireplace.

"Poor thing looks terrified," Fenris's friend said, to the giggles of the crowd.

Cheeks burning, Thistle struggled to maintain her grip on her bags while also freeing her hand from Anders's clutches. "Would you _please—_"

"Yes! Please free the house elves!"

"Anders," Fenris said, turning and drawing his wand, "let the girl go."

Thistle glared at him. "I can take care of myself," she said.

"So it comes to this," Anders said softly, though he seemed torn as to which was more important, his manifesto or Thistle's hand. "And so you reveal the truth: that wizards will go to any length to preserve their power!"

"Let the girl go and I won't have to do anything," Fenris said. "And let these poor people get on with their lunch."

Anders finally made a decision, dropping the manifesto and drawing his wand, pulling Thistle behind him. "These people shouldn't eat until they appreciate how little they would have, were it not for—"

Looking entirely bored with the rant, Fenris flicked his wand; Anders reacted immediately with a great slashing gesture, swinging Thistle around as he did so, and the deflected spell slammed straight into her bags, splitting them and spilling five pounds of Fizzing Whizzbees across the tavern floor. Her world went red; her wand was in her hand without her remembering to reach for it, and she was yelling, "_That was for my sister_!" and a spell before she knew what she was doing.

Anders, not expecting the attack, suddenly found himself flailing as his legs lost all sense of stability. Fenris flicked his wand again and sent Anders crashing into a table, which gave Anders the chance to brace himself and fling another spell, sending Fenris into high-pitched giggles. Annoyed, Thistle pointed her wand at him and said, "_Silencio_!" at the same time Fenris waved his wand; the spells collided and ricocheted off each other, silencing a dark-haired Slytherin girl and destroying one of the iron-wrought chandeliers. Anders fought his way back to his feet and shoved Thistle aside, shouting a spell she didn't recognize that sent Fenris flying into the air, appearing to dangle from his rather large ears.

In the midst of all the chaos a tall redhead whom Thistle instantly recognized as the Head Girl came barging into the group, the other Gryffindor girl and one of the Hufflepuff prefects hot on her heels. "Fenris!"

"He started it!" Fenris said between giggles, waving his wand to deflect another spell from Anders. It hit a lantern and shattered glass showered upon Thistle's Fizzing Whizzbees, rendering them inedible. Thistle raised her wand again, but the Head Girl pulled out her wand and yelled, "_Accio wands_," and all three combatants found themselves wandless and on the receiving end of a ferocious glare.

"That is _enough_," Head Girl Vallen said, hands on her hips. "Honestly, Fenris, I can't go on _one date_ without you causing trouble?"

"He started it," Fenris repeated, sullenly chuckling, still hanging by his ears.

Anders tried to stand up straight, but his legs finally collapsed and he landed right on his bum, his legs dancing out in front of him. "Oh, Anders," Vallen sighed. "Not you again."

"The house elves—"

"We've heard," she said firmly, turning her gaze upon Thistle, who straightened and stared defiantly back. "One of yours, Donnic?"

"Hawke," said the prefect, frowning at her. "What the devil are you doing in this mess?"

"Anders dragged her into it," the other Gryffindor said helpfully.

"They ruined my sister's candies," Thistle said, glaring when Fenris scoffed. "And they weren't cheap."

"Fenris doesn't like sweets," the Gryffidnor girl said. "He's entirely too sour."

"Thank you, Isabela," Vallen said, obviously fighting not to roll her eyes. "Anders, you'd better repair the damage, and I'll be telling Professor Stannard about this." He opened his mouth, but she cut him off. "And don't think she's forgotten that stunt you pulled in the Headmistress's office last month. They're still cleaning up the debris."

"I know," he said, doing his best to sound rebellious, though his dancing legs really just made him laughable, "and I want everyone to know that I will never rest—"

"And _you_," Vallen said, turning to Fenris and shaking her head, "will escort Miss Hawke back to Honeydukes and make proper restitution for her sister's sweets."

"Aveline—"

"And you two will both have detention, and it's fifty points apiece from Gryffindor, Slytherin, and Hufflepuff."

"_Aveline_," Isabela said, looking horrified, though the stout blonde in the corner booth cheered.

"And both boys will be scrubbing my floor for a month!" Madame Lusine called from where she'd been watching from behind the bar.

"You loved it, you old bat," Isabela called, and Madame Lusine shook her head. "Butterbeers for everyone on me!"

There was a mad stampede for the bar, and in the meantime Thistle found herself being guided from the inn, her wand pressed into her hand. "Sorry about that mess," Hendyr said, "but you really shouldn't have gotten involved between the two of them."

"I didn't mean to!" Thistle protested.

"I believe it," he said, "but in the future, watch out," and then Vallen came out, pulling Fenris by the leg as he rubbed a large red spot on his forehead, Anders and his wobbly legs kicking over her shoulder, snickering in time with Fenris's giggles.

"I'm taking this one to Professor Stannard," Vallen said, "would you mind seeing to the other two?"

"I'll take care of it," Hendyr said, and they shared a brief, weary, warm smile before she handed over Fenris's ankle and trotted off, Anders waving goodbye to Thistle as he bounced along.

Thistle shuddered and turned, looking up at the giggling Gryffindor boy before turning back to Hendyr. "Can I go back to the dormitory?"

"What about your candy?" he asked, glancing back at Fenris and trying to fight off a grin.

"All I want is five pounds of Fizzing Whizzbees," she said. "And I want them delivered to the Hufflepuff table tonight at dinner. Can you manage that?"

"Of course," Fenris said, glowering even as he gasped for breath "if someone will remove this confounded tickling charm from me."

"I'll think about it," Hendyr said, and when Fenris narrowed his eyes—winced in pain—he said, "You _did_ ruin my date."

"But we saved you from Madam Puddifoot's."

"True," Hendyr said, thoughtful. "Run along, Hawke. I'll make sure Bethany gets her candy."

And so Thistle returned to Hogwarts and holed herself up in the library, though Madam Petrice sniffed suspiciously at the sight of a fifth-year in the library on a Hogsmeade weekend, and when it came time for dinner she made her way to the Great Hall, sliding into a seat next to Carver, interrupting his conversation and earning a glare.

"Where's Bethany's candy?" he said. "If you forgot—"

"Sister! You're back!" Bethany cried, abandoning her friends to throw her arms around Thistle's shoulders. "Did you have a good time? Did the scarf keep you warm? Where's—"

The answer to Carver's question came in the form of a giant package, borne by four owls, and deposited into Bethany's squealing arms. She dumped it onto the table, knocking over Carver's glass as she ripped into the packaging and emerged with her first Fizzing Whizzbee, which she stuffed into Carver's mouth as he opened it to protest. Ignoring his strangled noises, she dove in for another, and soon both of Thistle's siblings were floating a few feet above the ground, one giggling, the other one trying to figure out how to propel himself through the air in order to strangle his twin.

Thistle smiled a little to herself, looking over to the Gryffindor table, where the Head Girl sat with her two friends, watching the Hufflepuff table and grinning—well, Vallen and Isabela were smiling; Fenris merely lifted his sullen eyebrows for a brief moment of levity. She looked back to her table to discover a bouquet of roses on her plate; a Slytherin girl, her dark hair in many pigtails, waved and pointed to her table, where Anders was smiling hopefully in her direction.

Thistle sighed. This was why she never left the common room.


	20. guess who's coming to dinner

**title:** guess who's coming to dinner  
**  
prompt:** someone gave quark a prompt she's always wanted filled, namely, leandra inviting fenris to dinner, and so i wrote it for her.

**originally written:** 4/8/2014

**notes:** written entirely in gchat, hence the lack of capitalization. sorry, everyone! 

* * *

"why fenris," leandra said, "i'm so glad to see you like the potatoes."

"er," fenris said, swallowing another stuck-to-the-roof-of-his-mouth bite. "yes."

"and remind me again," she said, "where are you from?"

"_mother_," hawke said desperately, as if perhaps she had presented her mother with a list of questions she was Not Allowed to Ask and perhaps her mother had chosen to ignore it.

"er," fenris said, wondering if taking another sip of wine to try to wash down the mashed potatoes would lead to leandra thinking him an alcoholic, "tevinter. er."

"ah yes," leandra said, calmly ignoring the daggers shooting forth from her daughter's eyes. "tell me, is it as awful as they say?"

"er," fenris said, suddenly self-conscious about his go-to filler word, beginning to think leandra might believe him to have a speech impediment, "that is, well, yes, madam."

"well, i am glad to hear it," leandra said, as hawke made gestures suggesting she wished to climb over the centerpiece and throttle her. "malcolm and i discussed heading north, but i thought it sounded like such a dreadful place."

"well," fenris said slowly, as leandra's eyes twinkled at him in a way that reminded him very strongly of her daughter and confused him greatly, "i must...commend you for your taste."

leandra smiled, still twinkling, and fenris found his feet actually twitching with the desire to run. "why thank you, fenris," she said. "more potatoes?"

**o.O.o  
**

"MOTHER," hawke said, having shooed away Orana and insisted that they would clear the dinner dishes themselves.

"yes dear?" leandra said, admiring the tart on the counter. "orana, you've really outdone yourself."

"thank you, ma'am," orana said, carefully dolloping whipped cream atop it.

"MOTHER," hawke said again, concerned her mother did not understand the full depths of her terror.

"i heard you the first time, dear," leandra said. "and do tell sandal he may lick the spoon."

"of course, ma'am," orana said, taking the empty bowl and the spoon with her.

"Mother," hawke said, attempting to tone down her urgency to less adolescent volumes, "what are you _doing_?"

"admiring a tart, dear."

"not right now," hawke said, then, frustrated, "yes right now, only out there. with..."

"yes?"

"fenris," hawke said, and as soon as she said his name she saw the _look_ in her mother's eye, the look that said she knew the exact depths and breadths and heights of hawke's enjoyment of the name.

"ah yes," leandra said, carefully picking up the tart and placing it upon its pedestal. "fenris."

"yes, mother," hawke said. "why are you so-"

"interested in him? well, darling, a good mother ought to show appreciation for her daughter's interests, and he seems to be occupying quite a bit of your time, lately."

hawke toed the ground guiltily. "i'm sorry i haven't been home more-"

"oh not at all, dear! you have your life to attend you," leandra said, admiring the tart upon its pedestal. "i just thought i'd see if your elf was as committed to his involvement with you as you are to him."

hawke opened and closed her mouth wordlessly, protestations of _we're not involved_ failing to come from her lips-no, to her horror, something far more desperate sprang forth-"and?"

"and what, dear?" leandra said, carefully lifting the pedestal and turning towards the door.

"_and_?" hawke said, nearly tripping over her feet in her haste to block her mother from leaving the kitchen.

"euphemia," her mother said, stopping short in the face of her daughter's tangled limbs, "use your words."

"and?" hawke said helplessly.

"and i suppose you'll have to ask him yourself, now won't you?" leandra carefully nudged her with her foot, just enough to cause her to step to the side without bashing her head on the doorframe. "now come, we don't want to him to wonder what we're up to, now do we."

hawke righted herself against the door frame and followed her mother back to the dining room, wondering just when she had become so...conniving.

**o.O.o  
**

fenris had not been wondering what they were up to. fenris had heard hawke's initial squawking and concluded that the following silence meant that leandra was spending her time quietly lecturing her daughter on all the reasons dating former slaves were unbecoming and beneath her.

after that split-second decision, he resigned himself to drinking all the wine on the table before they returned, in hopes that his drunken behavior would convince hawke to turn him out on the streets rather than risk dividing her already-splintered family. the fact that hawke had spent many evenings in his less-than-sober company already did not dampen his enthusiasm for his plan. there was quite a bit of wine; leandra hadn't appeared to touch hers.

"dessert!" leandra announced, carrying what appeared to be...something. fenris squinted and finished his glass, fumbling to set it down on the table, succeeding, more or less.

leandra set down the thing-ah, a tart, and it smelled of apples, and he _loved_ apples-and smiled at him, though her brow wrinkled with concern. "is that how one indicates they are through with their glass in tevinter?"

fenris blinked at the upside-down goblet, vaguely aware of hawke's nervous face appearing behind her mother.

"er."

"i'll take care of that," hawke said, picking it up and giving him a worried look-and sniff.

"it's fine," fenris said, speaking as carefully as he could.

"oh no, be a dear and take that back to the kitchen, will you?" leandra said, cutting into the tart.

fenris's terror was somewhat submerged beneath his alcoholic haze, but he recognized the panic in hawke's eyes as that of a kindred spirit, and had to resist an absurd urge to comment on it. "oh that's all right, mother, i'll just-"

"euphemia," her mother said-and what a lovely name, fenris thought, so musical and soft and pretty, so unlike the crisp businesslike surname, and as pretty as he found her he wasn't sure he would ever be able to see her as anyone other than hawke. it was what everyone called her; it was the sound of his salvation.

it occurred to him that he'd been staring at her for an awfully long time, and she was staring back at him, and he wasn't even sure why he was thinking about her name, come to think of it—

"euphemia," her mother said again, "the kitchen?"

hawke had sort of a queer smile on her face, and he thought he might have it too, and then she shook herself and said, "right! the kitchen. right. going, mother."

she picked up the goblet-leaning close enough for him to smell-had she put on _perfume_?-and started for the kitchen, but looked over her shoulder at him-"eyes where you're going, dear," leandra said, her eyes on the tart slices as she plated them.

"right! right," hawke said, narrowly avoiding an encounter with the sideboard on her way out of the dining room.

the room was more than silent when she'd gone; it was _empty_, and fenris found his fingers twitching for another glass of wine to take her place. instead he got leandra, bringing him a slice of tart topped with whipped cream.

"now," leandra said, seating herself next to him with a slight sigh indicating that the silence was a bit of a relief, though he felt nothing but sheer terror, "there are a few things i'd like to discuss with you, master elf."

fenris, unable to tear his eyes away from hawke's mother, at least stopped his mouth with a bite of-_delicious_ tart; he blinked and chewed, and his amazement must have shown on his face, because leandra laughed and said, "it is good, isn't it?"

mouth full, he nodded; she took a bite, and they chewed in companionable silence for a moment. "i gave orana the recipe; it came from my mother. of course," she said, and for a moment she was lost in a fond memory, looking again like her daughter-like fenris would never be able to look-"she never had the opportunity to serve it to malcolm.

"sometimes i regret that," she said, as fenris found the tart sticking to the roof of his mouth for entirely different reasons than those of the-"and i almost regret serving you those potatoes," she continued, and he was fairly certain the entire hawke family secretly wanted him to choke and die on his own surprise, "but euphemia insisted upon contributing to the meal."

"er," he managed, around a mouthful of tart.

"oh yes. she insisted that if i were out to ruin her life, she be allowed to mitigate as best she could." leandra paused, studied him, then handed him a glass of water. "please."

"thank you," he said, gulping down the glass, though it had the side effect of clearing his head, and he was fairly certain he'd rather be drunk for this conversation.

"but it showed you were a polite young man," leandra continued, "and so i allowed it. you are very polite, which i suppose comes from being a slave-yes, she's told me all about you," she said, as fenris flinched, "perhaps more than she's realized, but then she does tend to carry on without thinking about it.

"you, however, seem more the silent type." she appraised him, and he resisted the urge to tug at his collar, though the candlelight was starting to make him sweat. "and i think that's a good balance for her. she relies on you, you know."

fenris swallowed, and found his voice. "i...am indebted to her, as well."

it seemed woefully inadequate, suddenly, though he'd been very carefully being indebted to her and nothing else for so long that the sudden suggestion that he was in fact many other things-that she would _welcome_ those other things—

leandra smiled, almost sadly. "yes," she said. "a good balance."

a crash drew their attention to the door to the kitchen, where hawke was very guiltily picking up the remains of a vase on a sideboard. "er," she said, and fenris found himself smiling, "i, er. tripped."

"yes, dear," leandra sighed, rising from the chair and letting her skirt settle before gliding over to her daughter.

"i'm sorry," hawke said.

"don't worry, dear," leandra said, as sandal suddenly dropped down from-where, fenris wasn't sure-and began cleaning the shards. "dulci gave me that hideous thing months ago. i've been waiting for someone to trip over it."

"_mother_," hawke said, glancing at fenris, who found his smile broadening. even from the other end of the table he could see her cheeks redden in the candlelight.

"there, there, dear, i'm sure he's quite familiar with your maladroit ways," leandra said, and fenris barely suppressed his chuckle as hawke shriveled up with embarrassment. "now go enjoy your dessert. it's late, and i've got an engagement first thing tomorrow, so i'm off to bed."

hawke, three steps into escaping from the situation, stopped dead and twisted her head to look at her mother. "to bed?"

"certainly," her mother replied. "i do believe you've told me on several occasions you're too old for a chaperone, have you not?"

"mother," hawke said weakly, reaching for the back of a chair to steady herself, nearly turning it over, spinning on her feet to end up leaning against the table instead.

leandra smiled, and looked back to fenris with that familiar twinkle, and he found himself strangely-reassured? "it was so _lovely_ to meet you, fenris," she said, a genuine smile on her face. "we must do this again sometime."

"happily, madam," he said, raising his glass of water to her, as hawke gaped at him with something akin to betrayal on her face. "i am afraid my house is ill-suited to return the favor."

"that's all right, we'll have you here," leandra said. "i've heard all about your corpses." before hawke could even get the first syllable out, she smiled again and said, "good night, dears. enjoy your evening."

and up the stairs she went, leaving hawke and fenris alone, alternately staring at each other and looking anywhere else. fenris knew he would have to-_think_, and possibly to do, but for tonight-he pushed back the chair next to him, pulled forward a plate, and said, "tart?"

"yes, please, thank you," hawke said desperately, landing in the chair next to him, and for a minute they sat in companionable silence. the tart was almost good enough to distract him from all her nervous twitches, but finally he said, "what?" just as she said, "fenris-"

they both stopped, looked at each other, waited; finally he said, "please," and she said, "do you really want to come over again?"

"yes," he said, "if you'll have me."

"of course," she said, and then again, "of course," and the warmth in his stomach had nothing to do with tarts or alcohol or questionable mashed potatoes and everything to do with the smile in her eyes.

"good," he said, and then, as it occurred to him, "only one condition."

"anything," she said, and it took his breath away.

he found it again. "please, don't cook for me."

a fork flew past his head, and she looked as though she wanted to put the tart on his face as well-so he solved the issue by placing his next bite in her mouth-bold, perhaps, but it did stop whatever tirade of sound she had planned.

"thank you," he said, "for trying."

she stopped chewing, blushed, swallowed, and said, "you're...welcome."

there was a pause, and she said, "i really am a terrible cook."

"yes," he said.

"you didn't have to agree so quickly."

he shrugged, as he wasn't quite willing to offer an apology.

she seemed to realize this and sighed. "fenris?"

"yes, hawke?"

"thank you for having dinner with my mother."

"any time," he said, and it sounded a bit like freedom. "any time."

FIN


	21. xeranthemum

**Prompt:** xeranthemum: eternity, immortality  
**Originally written:** April 8, 2014  
**Notes:** part of a flower prompt meme on tumblr; thanks to ff dot net for not preserving the formatting

* * *

They say she ascended, but really it was—

strapped to a pole too rigid for the curves of her spine, unable to pull away from the flames licking at her feet, insistent, first sharp and then deep and lingering _pain_, skin crackling and peeling and disappearing in smoke and the _smoke_, the prickling tears in her dry eyes and the sting in her nose and the frantically growing desire to _breathe_, a thirst for air, for one last glimpse of the sky she loves—

and she swore she would be brave, but _this_—

she longs to breathe deeply enough to fall asleep, to let the fire consume her inside and out, but her stubborn lungs cough out the smoke, a welcome distraction from the last searing sense that she cannot feel her toes—

she does not see the sword till it has pierced the flames, and the sharp clean agony of it runs through her heart and her blood is wild, wild, racing through her veins to pour forth from its prison and suddenly it is slow and dark and she can no longer—

anything—

nothing—

everything—

light.


	22. raspberry

**Prompt:** raspberry, remorse  
**Originally written:** April 8, 2014  
**Notes:** part of a flower prompt meme on tumblr

* * *

She doesn't deal in regrets.

Her family may be dead or gone, her sometimes friends scattered to the four winds, her throne abandoned, her satchel empty and her waterskin dry—but she lives, and the stars shine in the clear sky above Sundermount's peak. And freedom—for so long, she has lived with the cares of others on her back, her mother's grief, her family's poverty, her companions' endless supply of enemies, a city's demons, a crown's iron weight; and now she sits alone on the mountaintop, unmourned, with nothing but her stripped-bare self to her name.

In any case, she has nothing left to lose.


	23. tidying up

**Prompt:** Quark was having a bad day

**Originally Written:** 6/17/2014

**Notes:** written entirely in gchat (again) late at night, hence the lack of capitalization. if it bothers you, just pretend you're reading a chat transcript. if you're one of those people who has clung to the rules of proper grammar even while chatting, i salute you, and apologize for being one of the fallen.

* * *

once upon a time fenris was brooding away in his mansion when there was a cheerful knock on the door. he thought it was a bit odd that hawke was bothering to knock but it was far too cheerful to be donnic, whose knocks were more good-natured, and the only other people who came to the mansion were isabela, who would just as soon swing in through the window, and...well, no, just isabela.

so it had to be hawke, so he got up from the darkest corner at the back of the house and skulked his way across the house, only to find hawke in his front hall, with a...thing.

"you were taking too long," she said by way of greeting, "so i just came in."

"what," fenris asked, "is _that_."

"this?" hawke said, brandishing it at him. he managed not to flinch. "it's my newest mage staff. i thought i'd test it out on you."

fenris eyed her.

"just kidding," she said. "it's a broom."

"i can see that," he said, because it was certainly broom-shaped, but with mages one could never be sure. "why have you brought a broom?"

"because," she said, "i've been feeling the urge to do some cleaning, but between orana and sandal the estate hasn't even the tiniest mote of dust."

"i've seen plenty of dust motes floating in the sunlight coming through the windows there," fenris noted.

"and so," hawke continued, pointedly ignoring him, "i was sitting there, feeling useless, when i remembered this wretched place, and so i came over to help."

"help what?"

"tidy the place up, of course."

"hawke," fenris said patiently, "i've lived like this for six to ten years, give or take."

"i know. it's an abomination." she paused, and then added, "metaphorically speaking, i don't mean to say that your house is possessed."

"hawke-"

"so anyway, i am going to sweep." she brandished the broom again, looked around the dimly lit hall, the corpses she'd long ago charmed to keep from decomposing, the cobwebs whose inhabitants might just drop down from the ceiling and try to kill her, they'd been there so long. "first, some light."

fenris watched helplessly as she suddenly began dancing around the corpses, humming and flinging little mage lights into the air as she went. "there," she said, apparently satisfied that she could now see every hint of filth that he'd been trying to hide behind "mood lighting" for as long as possible.

"now," she said, and suddenly out of nowhere she produced another broom, which she shoved into his hands, "we sweep."

"_we_?" he said, but the look she gave him was so ferocious that he gave in and began half-heartedly batting at a particularly thick cobweb. hawke continued humming as she started in on the layer of dust covering the floor with was much ferocity as she'd previously directed at him.

it wasn't half-bad, fenris had to admit, though his broom was turning into a giant cobweb itself. he didn't really mind, as half his mind was unconsciously occupied with picking up the thread of hawke's hum tuned, and the other half was quite consciously occupied with covertly spying on her as her broom encountered the first corpse. she tried a little sweeping motion, and then a gentle nudge, and then turning her broom around and poking it with the handle, and she was just about to kick it when fenris said, "i'll take care of it."

"_will_ you?" she said archly, but he abandoned his broom to the cobweb (into which it disappeared, possibly never to return) and bent down and hefted the corpse-oddly heavy, given how long it had been there-over his shoulder.

"where are you going?" hawke asked as he headed towards the door.

"...to deposit it outside?"

"fenris," hawke said, completely horrified, "you cannot leave corpses on your doorstep."

"well where else am i supposed to put them?" fenris huffed. this was why he hadn't bothered moving them in the first place. also, he didn't care how strong hawke's magic was, this close he was pretty sure the thing smelled, at least a little.

"i...i don't know," hawke said. "a nice back alley? the nearest drainage ditch?" she paused, tapping the end of her broom handle against her chin as if she'd already forgotten she'd just been using it to shove a dead man. "maybe the guard has some sort of corpse collection agency?"

"i'm pretty sure they collect the corpses and the murderers at the same time."

"oh, come now, it's been years, like you said!" she said. "aveline couldn't possibly persecute you-"

"aveline was there when it happened."

"well," hawke said, "true. drainage ditch it is, i think."

fenris didn't try to tell her that he didn't know where the nearest drainage ditch was, nor that he had no intention of dragging a dead man over his shoulder while trying to find one. "there's one out back, i think," he said, resolving to hide them in the cellar.

"oh?" hawke said, excited, though he couldn't guess why. "i'll come along, you've never let me see your courtyard."

"ah," fenris said, beginning to grow uncomfortable under the corpse's weight, "it's, ah. overgrown."

"then we can fix it together!" hawke said, clapping her hands. "i've done so much work with the garden at the estate, i have plenty of cuttings we can try, what kind of sun-"

"_hawke_," fenris said, trying to resist the charming thought of watching hawke garden in his courtyard, "it's a bit late for that. tonight."

"oh," she said, deflating in a way that pierced him as sharply as his blade had pierced the corpse over his shoulder. "you're right."

"but perhaps tomorrow," he said immediately, starting to reach for her but stopping sort when the corpse started slipping. "in the morning, you could come look at it?"

hawke beamed at him, looking as though she'd throw her arms around him if it weren't for, well, you know. "absolutely!" she said. "and just imagine how nice it will be, coming in through a nice clean entry hall-"

"yes," he said, "i'm going to go dispose of this corpse now."

"yes, yes," she said, already distracted by the dust collecting around the sconces. "please do."

he spent the next several minutes ferrying corpses to the cellar, returning to the front hall each time to find hawke having made miraculous progress on the disaster that was his front hall. once he came back to discover she'd lined up two armies of dust bunnies and was busy talking strategy with one side-something about flanking and holding the line at all costs. he edged past her, and in the midst of her speech she reached up and caught his hand, just for a moment, and as he startled he saw the curve of her smile out of the corner of his eye. he grabbed another corpse and hefted it to hide his blush, edging back out even more carefully in order to avoid brushing her hair with the corpse's hand.

he returned to find the ruined battlefield-or scrubbed floor tiles, depending on your point of view-being prayed over, as what appeared to be a small bonfire made entirely of cobwebs and dust burned in the corner.

"For there is no darkness in the Maker's Light, and nothing that He has wrought shall be-oh, you're back," hawke said, dropping her hands to her side. "what do you think?"

the mage lights, rather than weakly peeking around the dust motes choking the air, now sparkled gaily off the marbled tile he hadn't even realize he had, haloing around their mistress's hair as she anxiously awaited his verdict. "it's very..." he trailed off, distracted by her eager gaze, the enthusiasm with which she practically vibrated. "lively."

"well, yes," hawke said. "that's what happens when you clear a hall of dead men. what happened to your broom?"

"i think it's on the pyre," he said, considering the flames. "i believe the cobwebs won that particular skirmish."

"ah," she said, looking at him as though she suspected he hadn't tried his hardest. he tried not to squirm, reminded himself she wasn't a blood mage and had no way of reading his mind and finding out about the corpses in the cellar. "blessed are they who stand before the corrupt and the wicked and do not falter."

"it was a broom."

"who clearly deserved a better fate," she said. "you know, i haven't seen any actual spiders. are you sure they're not lurking in the ceiling?"

"quite," he said. "it is lovely, hawke."

hawke, caught looking at the ceiling with suspicion, darted a glance at him, surprised and glad and-relieved. "you're welcome, fenris," she said. his lips curved in a smile, looking at her, and after a moment she dropped his gaze again, looking at the floor, the lights, her cheeks turning a fetching shade of red. "we should," she began, glancing at him, "um, celebrate."

"yes," he agreed, stepping towards her.

"with a bottle of wine?" she suggested, looking up at him, cheeks still red, biting her lip-on _purpose_, he was sure, but she was doing a damn good job of pretending.

"ye-no," he said, barely remembering the corpses in time. "no. er, not tonight. it's...late."

"that's never stopped you before," hawke said, laughing, but her eyes narrowed. "what are you hiding?"

fenris debated kissing her-determined it would only increase her suspicion-settled for saying, "a very dirty dining room."

"oh," hawke said, sufficiently distracted. "that is very true."

"indeed," he said, reaching forward and brushing his fingers against hers, barely smiling again as she inhaled sharply. "so perhaps instead we ought-"

"clean it too!" hawke said, skipping backwards and smirking at his half-opened mouth. "now come, we need to find you another broom. do you think there's one in the cellar?"

"i-"

"let's find out!" she said, clapping her hands, her eyes promising that she was going to find out his every secret and make him pay for keeping them from her. "come on," she said, reaching for his hand, kissing him on the cheek as he reluctantly followed, "it will be fun."

"fun," he sighed, tangling his fingers with hers, half his mind occupied with coming up with further distractions from the cellar, the other half utterly content. "it always is."

FIN


	24. redheaded stepchild

**Prompt:** "redheaded stepchild" and "my mother is a fish"

**Originally Written:** 1/26/11

**Notes:** ...apparently I've never posted this! Here is a Cousland. She grows up to survive the Cousland origin wearing only boots and her smallclothes, and I love her.

* * *

When Susan Cousland was six years old, her brother Fergus told her she was adopted.

"I am not," Susie said, with all the dignity a six-year-old could muster with her brother's prize collection of painted skyballs strewn in pieces before her feet.

Fergus's eyes were dark and spiteful. "Yes you are," he said. "No one in our family has red hair. Mother and—_my_ mother and father must have found you on the doorstep and felt sorry for you."

"Nuh-uh," she said, but her brother—if he_ was_ her brother—was caught up in the story, his anger providing a wealth of detail too true to ignore.

"Oh yes," he said, grinning spitefully into the tears welling in her eyes, "it's why you're so sneaky—your _real_ parents are paupers from Denerim. Your father cuts purses and your mother's a fishwife and they _begged_ Mother and Father to take you in. They said your hair was pretty and would catch any noble's eye, but really it's just the color of an apple gone bad. Nan wanted to throw you out but luckily Mother and Father are nice and decided to keep you anyway. It's only 'cause they're generous that we keep a spiteful, clumsy, dumb little fat _brat_ like you around." He shoved her with a shoulder, rocking her on her feet, and stormed out of the room.

Susie's lip trembled, but she wouldn't cry. He wasn't really her brother, after all. It all made sense: why Fergus had dark hair and she didn't, why Nan was constantly chasing her around with a broom, why Fergus always got to do things and she had to sit in the corner and stay out of sight, why all of the Couslands' friends said she was "pretty." And now she'd smashed his skyballs and her real parents wouldn't be able to pay for it and they'd cast her out of the house and—

"Wait!" she said, nearly tripping over her feet to catch up to him. He barely glanced at her over his shoulder, but she took that as encouragement to continue. "Maybe my mommy is Gilmore's mommy!" She stumbled and grabbed his hand from habit, and he didn't drop her, which was nice. "Gilly has red hair too."

The faint frown of confusion melted into malicious delight. "No," he said, shaking off her hand, "your mother is definitely a fishwife."

He didn't wait to see if she would follow him; for her part, Susie stood on the cobblestones, fat tears running down her fat cheeks as if her own personal stormcloud had unleashed its fury upon her fat little head. Fergus would go tell the teyrn what she had done and there was nowhere she could hide because _no one_ (other than Gilly, who would've been a much better brother than Fergus could ever hope to be) had hair like hers.

There was only one solution.

**o.O.o  
**

"Susie, pup, _please_ come down," came the teyrn's voice, gentle and coaxing. From her position thirty feet up the tallest tree in Highever, she couldn't see him; the flickering light of the torches necessary to illuminate the courtyard at approximately two o'clock in the morning filtered through the summer leaves, thick and green and providing plenty of cover.

Fergus had found her about half an hour ago, but she'd refused to let go of her branch and kicked him in the face when he tried to pry her loose. She was tired and her arms hurt from hugging her branch, but she was determined to stay in the tree until her fake family went away and she could safely make for Denerim. Her knapsack held all the rolls and sweetmeats she could swipe from Nan, as well as the teyrn's letter-opener and the teyrna's face cream, which had been described during one of the parental arguments as costing "a fortune" and therefore would probably let her buy stuff she would need once she got to Denerim, like pauper clothes. No matter what the future held, she wasn't going back.

"Susan, quit making a fool of yourself and _come down_." The teyrna's voice was angry and tired and, Susie thought in a fit of childish exhaustion, afraid.

"You can't make me!" she yelled, shaking the branch for emphasis.

"Pup, it's late, and if you fall asleep you'll fall and break your neck." There was a pause, which she refused to fill with a reply, and then he called, "Pup—"

"Come on, Susie," Fergus called, and he definitely sounded afraid. "Stop playing around. We all want to go to bed."

"I'm not going to bed!" Safe in the knowledge that no one could get her, she added, "I'm going to Denerim!"

"_Denerim_," the teyrna said in disbelief; she couldn't hear what was said next, but there was a definite threat in the words that followed. "Susan Cousland, I don't know what has put it into your head that you want to go to Denerim. Put that foolish nonsense out of your head and come down at _once_."

"Listen to your mother, pup," said the teyrn, with a note of weary defeat in his voice.

She couldn't believe they were still bothering to lie. "She's not my mother!" She took a deep breath and hollered, for all of Highever to hear, "MY MOTHER IS A FISH!"

The silence stretched forever. Then Fergus said, "I said fishwife, you dope."

"You said _what_?" the teyrna said, her voice dangerous. Fergus mumbled something, and lots of yelling and threats and general unpleasantness happened on the ground, and Susie's eyes drooped and she tried to pinch herself to stay awake but her hands were an integral part to holding onto the tree branch and-

The branches below her rustled, and a head belonging to Rory Gilmore, Highever's newest squire, appeared. "Hey, Susie, I—you..." He stared at her for a moment, taking in her appearance: scratched face, snotty nse, once-long hair now raggedly cut short with a letter-opener and Nan's sewing shears and black from where she'd tried to color it with ink. She sniffled, and he recovered himself and said, "Your father sent me to bring you down."

"My father's a purse," she said, and his face twitched.

"No, he's not," he said. "Your father's the teyrn of Highever, and you're as Cousland as they come. Fergus was just angry about the skyballs."

She sniffed again. "They're not going to throw me out?"

He shook his head and the leaves rustled for emphasis. "I'm here to help you down," he said. "Come on, I'll give you a piggy back ride."

She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and, clutching her knapsack, carefully climbed down to him, squirreling her way onto his back, wrapping her arms around his skinny chest. He made surprisingly good time down the tree, and she barely had time to touch her feet to the Maker-blessed ground before her father had swooped her up in a tight hug, squeezing the breath from her body and kissing her head. Her feet flew out as he swung her around in a circle, and then he set her down and said, "Pup, don't you _ever_ scare me like that again."

"Sorry, Papa," she said, looking down at the ground and sneaking triumphant glances at a red-faced Fergus. His ear looked as though it had been thoroughly pinched, and something told her she'd be eating his desserts for a month to come.

"Susan—oh my little girl—" and her mother clutched her and covered her face with salty kisses "—_never again_, young lady, do you hear me, oh my goodness, my baby—" She drew back and stopped short, staring at her daughter in the torchlight. Susie smiled up at her in relief; over her mother's shoulder she could see her father, and her big stupid brother was there too, and the whole family was together, and she was a part of it, and—

"Susan Elethea Cousland, _what have you done to your hair_?"

—all was well.


	25. wynne and birthdays

**Prompt:** Wynne and birthdays

**Originally Written: **7/8/14

**Notes:** forthcoming are a couple of prompts I did for my Tumblr birthday.

_i don't think this really applies but oh well here you go FIRST COME FIRST SERVE_

* * *

Nothing about Wynne inclines one to wonder about her youth, neither her creaking voice nor her sharp tone, nor her white hair, its shorn length held back in an unfashionable tail; and certainly not her mottled hands, nor the frost that leaps from wrinkled fingers. She seems a creature of magic—indeed she is, a feather of a soul alighted upon the deep well of a Fade spirit—and the thought that she might once have been—_otherwise_—

a mother, exhausted and strong, finding her first grey hairs in the mirror as her baby cries in the hands of the templars taking him away

a lover, thick tumbling locks and lips painted with smuggled color, a mocking laugh and an enticing smile

a girl, smooth and careless, crying _look, mama, look_ as the wisps dance around a cake and illuminate her parents' horror

—well. It's difficult, and why not? a Fade spirit cannot change any more than a dead woman

if she was all of these things, she is none of them now.


	26. hawkefenris, i'm starving

**Prompt: **hawke/fenris...i'll take three lines i'm starving

**Originally Written: **7/8/14

**Notes:** This is totally not a Quark prompt. Yup. Totally.

_I don't know you at all, nonny, I'm sure._

* * *

"Fenris," Hawke said, not bothering to lift her head from where she'd pillowed it on her arms as she lay on the hearth.

"Yes?" Fenris said, not bothering to look up from the book he read from the comfort of an armchair pulled just a bit closer to the hearth than Orana had originally placed it.

"I'm hungry," Hawke said, voice still muffled.

"I see," Fenris said, turning the page as carefully as he could manage, given how desperately he wanted to know what happened next.

The fire crackled.

"Fenris," Hawke said, lifting her head and settling her chin on her arms, "I'm hungry."

"So you said," he replied, eyes busy parsing a particularly complicated sentence.

"Fenris," she said, and he felt the barest—he pulled his feet up into the chair, shifting to tuck them underneath him. "I'm hungry."

"I fail to see how that affects me," he said, tickled foot notwithstanding.

"Find me some food," she said, her voice a bit strained, though he didn't deign to see how far she was stretching to try to reach him.

"No," he said, delighting in the word.

"I know you've stopped reading," she said, and he couldn't quite keep from guiltily skimming the next three lines to get his eyes moving again. "Since you have, could you get me something to eat?"

He waited.

"Please?"

He sighed, reached behind the throw pillow next to him, pulled out a rumpled paper sack, and tossed it to the floor, all while returning his attention to the intricacies of Varric's latest thriller. He couldn't block out the rustling of the paper, Hawke's deep sniff of its contents and subsequent sigh of happiness, or the glee with which she took her bite of a still-warm sweet roll from the Lowtown market.

"Oh Fenris," Hawke said, or something along those lines, as he was certain her mouth was otherwise occupied with sweet roll, "you _do_ care."

"Hmph," was, he thought, enough of a response as he shifted again to drop his feet to the ground. The plot twist was only a few pages away, he could practically _taste _it—and Hawke was idly rubbing his foot with one hand while she licked the remains of the sweet roll from the other, and the fire was warm, and it was, all in all, a good night.


	27. alistaircousland, pre-romance

**Prompt:** Dragon Age, Alistair/Cousland pre-romance

**Originally Written:** 7/16/14

**Notes:** This is Susie Cousland again, as found in "redheaded stepchild."

I confess that my Cousland who romances Alistair is a bit of a screwball, so I hope you forgive me for using her here.

* * *

The new recruits fought well, Alistair noted, which was good, since at least two of them had more combat experience in their right hands than he had in his entire life, but now wasn't the time to dwell on the fact that until six months ago all his experience had been theoretical. They'd only encountered wolves so far, but darkspawn lurked at the edges of his perception in the general direction they needed to go. Which was also good, as there was no Joining without darkspawn blood, but he'd seen men —okay, _he'd _fallen apart at the sight of his first darkspawn, and with the whispers of the Blight came darkspawn much stronger than the ones he'd first faced and if the two good recruits fell apart no amount of being able to _sense_ the darkspawn would save their skin—

As for the third recruit, well, Alistair wasn't sure what she'd do. Since she'd first shown up in nothing but boots and a borrowed breastplate ("Hadn't time to change!" she'd said cheerfully, as Alistair had tried not to stare and babbled on about Maker knew what until Duncan showed up to frogmarch her to the quartermaster) she'd been…enthusiastic, to say the least. She'd been particularly eager to venture into the Wilds, but then she'd been almost equally excited over Duncan's bonfire. So far there had been no limit to her energy and nothing to mar the smile on her face—he'd almost call it manic, if it hadn't also been…sweet. Anyway, the other two men didn't seem to know what to do with her either, and so Alistair joined them in gingerly avoiding her direct gaze and thus attention.

This wasn't particularly hard, as her eyes were constantly roving and she was constantly almost tripping over roots and tufts of grass and rocks in her haste to see—well, everything, it seemed like. Alistair was just beginning to contemplate how a person might constantly correct their balance as part of their personal gait when suddenly she stopped, gaze stuck, smile replaced by a soft "oh" that did funny things to his insides—

_Stop that_, he told his insides (he didn't even know if she was going to survive the night and besides there was a _Blight_ on, you'd think his insides would have a clue) as his ears noticed what his eyes hadn't picked up on, a low painful moan coming from a man on the ground, clutching his stomach.

"Oh," the third recruit—he was going to have to ask her name again, _blast_ her for showing up nearly naked—said again, "he's hurt."

"Please," the wounded soldier groaned. Alistair, seeing a helpless concern in Daveth's eyes and fearful wariness in Ser Jory's, crouched down and did what he could with the bandages he had. It wasn't much, and anyway the man was probably tainted and would die before the evening ran out, and just as he was considering how to tactfully prepare the soldier for his fate the female recruit shoved him aside, her hands shaking as she uncorked a flask filled with red liquid and held it to the soldier's lips.

"Where'd you get that?" Alistair demanded—Duncan hadn't let _him_ requisition any potions from the quartermaster—but she wasn't listening to him.

She _was_ apologetically wiping spilled potion from the soldier's face as he took the flask and drank for himself. Her smile had returned. Her gaze was fixed. "Your commander," she said, the wonder in her voice replaced with an urgency he hadn't realized she possessed. "Your commander, who was he?"

"Miss," the soldier said helplessly, color returning to his cheeks—maybe tainted, but maybe not, "thank you, miss, but miss—"

"Your commander," she said again. "Your commander wasn't Fergus Cousland, was he?"

_Cousland_, that had been it, something Cousland, and technically Grey Wardens gave up their surnames but she wasn't a Warden yet and it would do—

"No," the soldier said, his expression clearing of confusion if not of pain. "Cousland's men were to go to the east. No idea what happened to them."

She smiled again—beamed—a hard, determined, brilliant _shining_ thing, unshed tears and an implacable joy, and it left him—breathless? _Stop that_, he said again, more sternly, stumbling to help her help the soldier to his feet. This left him standing uncomfortably close to her—favoritism wouldn't do, and especially not towards a pretty—_blast_, Duncan was going to—Duncan didn't have to _know_, but of course he would, and he was going to have his head for this.

And then she looked at him, and smiled, and said brightly, "Which way to the darkspawn?"

"Um," he said, pointing on instinct rather than sense, "that way?"

"Excellent," she said, and then, "Oh, look at this pretty flower!" and she was off, careening heedlessly into certain danger for the sake of the local foliage.

Alistair looked hopefully at the other two recruits, but they were looking back at him as if _he_ were in charge—of course they were, because he was, and so he took a deep breath, pretending this was all part of the plan. "Right, then," he said, vaguely aware that somewhere just beyond sight his third charge was halfway up a tree in the name of scouting ahead, "shall we?"

"If we must," Ser Jory said, shifting as though his greatsword had just become a little heavier.

"'Course we must," Daveth said. "Someone's got to keep up with the little bit."

_Doomed_, Alistair thought gloomily, as the third recruit shouted something about hangmen, and then he thought, _well, they're all doomed, one way or another_, but his rebellious insides didn't like that, so he added, _and so am I_, which wasn't exactly comforting but was—something.

And her smile. That was something else.


End file.
